Directions of Change in Southern California English

Abstract

Bret Harte has attributed to the miners of California a peculiar, strongly-marked, and affected dialect, but he has drawn on his imagination for the greater part of it. A mixed population like that in the mines, representing every state in the Union, and every county of Great Britain, could not have a dialect; and nowhere is the English language better understood, or spoken with more force, elegance, and purity, by the poorer classes of people, than in this State.¹ If you want to hear the general American of the future, Hollywood and TV-studio based, go to California and listen to the speech of the California-born younger generation (not, of course, to the immigrants from other states, who will carry their local intonations with them to their dying day). Do you recall how in the Presidential campaign of 1960, Kennedy's ahsk and Africar stood out like sore thumbs, while Nixon never drew a lifted eyebrow? Nixon spoke the general American of the future, an American shorn of all local peculiarities. ²